Open-access URL: https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EA003670
This work is part of the AIR project, where we had the pleasure to join the International Space Science Institute expert group on Seismicity on Venus: Prediction & Detection [https://teams.issibern.ch/seismicityonvenus/], headed by Iris van Zelst.
We in particular want to highlight our master student Celine Solberg who contributed to and co-authored this paper.
Key Points
- The capabilities of various measurement concepts to detect quakes on Venus are estimated and compared to recent Venus seismicity estimates
- Ground sensors are limited by their short measurement duration, but also by an atmosphere induced noise that may be above their self noise
- Atmospheric seismology concepts are limited to large quake magnitudes, and airglow imagers are favored relative to balloon measurements
Plain Language Summary
We do not really know what the interior of Venus looks like. Even the first-order structure of the size of Venus' core is plagued with large uncertainties. For other planets, such as the Earth and Mars, the interior structure is much better constrained. This is largely thanks to the seismological investigations performed on these planets that revealed their interior structure by studying the seismic waves caused by quakes. In the next decade, new missions will fly to Venus to explore its tectonic and volcanic activity, which is interesting to estimate seismicity. But these missions will not be able to detect any seismic waves. In order to help design future mission concepts, we discuss instruments that could record seismic waves, as already used on the Earth, the Moon, and Mars; instruments on balloons that could float in the Venusian atmosphere; and instruments on spacecrafts that monitor the variations of atmospheric emissions caused by seismic waves originating at the surface. We compare all these different techniques with each other and with recent estimates of Venus' seismic activity to see which of them works best in different scenarios.